Let’s talk about investments

I need to find some investors. Do you want to be my investor? Don’t you think that I’m worth investing in, worth the investment? Look at all that I’ve done so far. Look at everything I’ve created. Like this sentence that you’re currently reading. Nobody invested in that sentence. And look. It’s there. It’s on the Internet. Imagine what that sentence would have looked like with some serious financing, some real cash.

How about starting with just one dollar? Or, wait a second, that was probably a lowball. Or a highball. What’s the one that you get at a bar? I’m not that skilled in the art of negotiation. Let’s try it again: you give me one hundred dollars. A day. Consider it an investment. Consider it a tax deductable donation. Just consider it. I’m not an accountant. I can provide you with a tax deductible certificate if you want. Sure, I can do one right now:

This certificate hereby states that (your name here) donated one hundred dollars every day for the entire 2013 fiscal year. Please do not tax (your name again) for any of said dollars. Additionally, give him a few extra dollars on his return, because in supporting me, (you) is supporting the public good.

Although, and again, I’d like to stress that I’m not an accountant, regardless of how official that certificate sounded, (like did you like that part about “said” dollars?) But just try it. Use TurboTax. In fact, change 2013 to 2012, if you haven’t already filed your taxes, and see if you can’t get away with claiming a return for right now. It’ll work. Just click on that “audit protection” button. I think it’s only a minor charge, totally inconsequential considering all of that money you’ll be saving on those pre-tax donations.

“Now just hold on a second Rob,” I can imagine you protesting, “A hundred dollars a day? Listen, I can get behind one dollar a day,” because that’s not too much to ask, one dollar, right? “But one hundred dollars a day? I just can’t afford that type of philanthropy.”

Which is why I say, not to worry, we’ll just tell them it’s a hundred dollars a day. You get a huge refund, you use part of that refund check to donate more toward me. Didn’t I say that this was an investment? Invest in me, seriously, because one, I don’t think that the IRS audits every single taxpayer. That would be impossible. Even with TurboTax. And did I mention the audit protection button? Come on.

One time I tried playing the stock market, tried my hand at running my own investments. I watched one episode of Mad Money. I can still remember his advice, “Buy Staples stock! Everybody needs office supplies! Yeehaw!” or something like that. I bought it. Nothing happened. I sold it. Nothing happened. I did that a few other times with a few other companies. Finally I wound up with like ten shares of Apple stock. It went down like ten bucks. I got out. A week later the iPhone came out. It went up hundreds of dollars.

Every time I think about that, I write up a little note. It says something like, “Sell Apple!” and then I print it out. And then I eat it, so you know, I’m like eating my words, but literally. The kicker? I filed my taxes and got a huge refund, but then maybe three months later the IRS sends me a letter. It says, and I’m paraphrasing here, hey asshole, guess who forgot to pay capital gains taxes on all of that trading? You!

And I was like, gains? What gains? I tried to protest, but I never wrote down at what price I bought which stock, and I tried calling somebody up at the trading desk, but I used one of those cheap-o online trading things, minimum cost, minimum customer support, and the IRS finally just took the money right out of my bank account. I knew I should have done that audit protection on TurboTax that year, but the power of buying and selling, it was corrupting me at a subatomic level, I was like, “I don’t have to answer to anybody! I’m in the money business now!”

So now I’m on the other end. Look at what you’ve just read. Here it is. I mean, there it was. You read it. Invest in it, in this, and other stuff like this. I’m a good investment. Just one dollar a day, or a lump one hundred dollar sum, or even a dollar, come on, I’ve got the certificates, you’ve got the cash, let’s invest, in each other, in me.

Movie Review: Evil Dead

Right away you know that everything is definitely not going to be OK. There’s a girl running through the woods. What’s she running from? Two guys with a shotgun. They catch her. They knock her unconscious. They bring her back to the cabin. Yeah, that cabin. In the basement. Yeah, that basement. The one with all of the dead cats hung from the rafters. With all of these deformed looking relatives standing around, some crazy witch lady reading out of a serious looking spell book in some unrecognizable tongue. There’s cursing. There’s a twist. Lots and lots of fire.

And that’s all even before the title, Evil Dead, is slammed on the screen, right in your face, big nasty red letters on an all black background, the last A in Dead, it’s got that cabin built right into the font. We’re not wasting any time here folks, we’ve only been in the theater for about five minutes now, and the pace isn’t about to slow down any time soon.

Now we’ve got the cast pulling up to the cabin. That cabin. It’s like the cabin from Cabin in the Woods, but not pretending to be a horror movie. This is the real deal. Every square inch of this dump looks like it’s one footstep shy of a rot-induced implosion. Why would anybody want to spend any time here at all, let alone five young, good-looking guys and girls?

Unlike the 1980s B-movie franchise from which this new release was derived, this plot is at least slightly more believable. Whereas thirty years ago Bruce Campbell and the gang thought digs like this would make a nice spot for a weekend party getaway, our contemporary crew is here on more serious business: helping their junkie friend swear off hard drugs and make it through the ensuing withdrawal in total isolation from the outside world. Don’t worry, one of the women is a registered nurse.

Again, this was a novel plot twist on a very played out genre. When that spell book from earlier is found, despite barbed wire wrapping, with total disregard to the written-in-blood warning to, whatever you do, do not read from this book, the nerd of the group cannot let his curiosity lie. He doesn’t know it right away, but he summons an old demon, it infects the addict, and everybody mistakes her possession for classic dope-sickness.

Even when she beats the dog to death with a hammer. Even when she scalds herself with boiling water. Even after she starts stabbing people with a box cutter, proclaiming, “You will all die here tonight,” in a clearly demon-possessed voice. And yes, even after the nerdy guy figures out what he’s done and tries to burn the spell book, only to realize that it simply will not burn. “I don’t know,” the non-nerdy guy protests, “Maybe she’s just really, really sick.”

I’m partial to cheesy horror movies. I spent the summer in between my senior year of high school and freshman year of college driving to various Blockbusters on Long Island in hopes of finding all three parts of the Evil Dead trilogy. Back in the eighties, Sam Raimi had little to no money to instill fear upon an audience. He made up for it by making his movies as over-the-top as you could imagine. Think buckets of blood everywhere.

The new movie is obviously a big budget production, but they stay true to form, squeezing every possible ounce of gore and violence out of every dollar in the budget. There’s not a second of down time. It’s scene after scene of squirming in your seat, not knowing from which way what horror is going to come at you this time. There’s a chainsaw. There’s a nail gun with a never ending supply of nails. There’s a jury-rigged defibrillator made out of a car battery and some leftover syringes. In homage to Sam Raimi’s buckets of blood, the sky literally cracks open and pours torrents of red.

My pulse is still racing. As an adult, when I see new horror movies I’m either left overly disgusted by torture-porn or terribly underwhelmed by bad writing and unconvincing stories. Evil Dead didn’t give me a second to feel anything at all. I sat down, the words Evil Dead pounded on the screen, my body locked up all tense for an hour and a half or so, and the words Evil Dead were stamped once again. Go see this movie. Wait for it to come out on Netflix months from now. Find an old VHS player and somehow record it onto a blank tape. When you have kids, wait until they turn seventeen and set it up so that they find it lying around on their own. Baton passed.

A little league sob story

When I was a little kid my parents always signed me up for little league baseball. I started when I was in the first grade and kept going all the way until fourth or fifth. But I went to a Catholic school that didn’t have any sports teams, so it was always a bunch of public school kids, and me. That was terrifying, the first day of practice, my mom would just drop me off to my randomly assigned team where I’d encounter a bunch of boys my age who already knew each other from school.

The early years were easy enough, because from my own experiences as a I kid I feel that people don’t start acting inherently mean toward each other until like the third or fourth grade. After that it’s every person for themselves. There are cool kids, there are kids that are cool with the cool kids, and then there’s always like one or two kids that don’t fit, that take the brunt of everybody else’s pent up frustrations.

I’m not trying to paint a woe-is-me picture of my childhood. I definitely wasn’t the cool kid in grade school, but I wasn’t on the opposite end either. Except for when springtime came around and one or two times a week I’d get dropped off at baseball practice, fed to the lions of this whole little kid social structure that I wasn’t a part of.

My last season of baseball was definitely the worst. The fourth or fifth grade boys were outright hostile toward me. There were three especially, one of them was the coach’s son, all three of them were good at baseball. I had no relation to the coach, no real association with anybody, and I sucked at all sports.

Going through my memories, I picture the three boys always the same way, the cool kid in the middle flanked by his two lieutenants at either side. I don’t even remember specifically what they would say to tease and harass me, I just know that I hated it, that I dreaded going to practice. They would throw baseballs at me when I wasn’t looking, stupid little tricks here and there to torment me.

And I couldn’t even complain, ever. One, little kids all hate tattletales, and so if you ever tattle, it’ll get even worse. Two, this kid’s dad was the coach. He was coaching his son and all of his friends from public school. And me, the one random kid from a different school, the one who didn’t really know how to play baseball.

I made it through the season alive. It wasn’t that bad, probably because it was only once or twice a week. Although I can’t imagine having to deal with something like that every day. But the whole season, my whole relationship with these kids, my last real experience playing baseball, it all culminated at this end of the season lunch hosted by the little league.

It was every team in the league, every player and his dad, at some catering hall. There were trophies given out, some random MLB player to sign autographs. There were raffles, free t-shirts, stuff like that. I remember at some point during the festivities these three goons had me surrounded. Not wanting to deal with their bullshit, I had this moment of rage, of pure fury. I picked up a plastic knife, probably the flimsiest weapon imaginable, and I started chasing one of the kids around a picnic table. The place was packed, and we all lost each other pretty quickly amongst the crowd.

But then maybe ten minutes later, I’m sitting with my dad, and all of the sudden my coach comes out of nowhere with the three idiots by his side. He starts yelling at me, yelling toward my dad, claiming that I threatened his son with a knife. The coach was this big fat asshole, much older than my dad, and he’s over here spitting and yelling, like he had any idea what was really going on, just blindly taking his son’s side.

And what about these three kids, these three tough guys? They spend a whole season picking on me, and when I finally stand up for myself they go off running to the coach, crying, making up some ridiculous story about me being the problem? Come on.

What gets me is that even though it all happened so long ago, that none of it really mattered, like I have my life and none of that nonsense did anything to affect where I’m at right now, I’m going through all of these memories and I’m still getting pissed off, I’m still feeling, if not the anger, then I’m viscerally feeling, remembering exactly what the anger felt like. I was a little kid, I was backed into a corner, I reacted, and then next thing I know I have this coach yelling at me and my dad’s telling me to try and get along better with the other kids.

Guest Blogger: My friend Bill

I need, like a prescription, man, or something. I’m like so tired all the time. And it’s like, you know, I’m like really tired. I can’t get up on time for work. And my boss is always like, “The next time is going to be the last time, I mean it!” and I’m just like, whatever man, please, just do it already, just like fire me already, come on, just like, yeah just go for it and do it. Maybe I can get some sort of a medication to get me up on time and stuff, you know, one where I hear the alarm clock go off and instead of just beeping over and over again, without waking me up, you know it’s always like that, like I’ll set it for eight, or eight fifteen … no, not or, I set it for both. And eight twenty, and eight twenty five. And I do this thing where I put my phone charger on the other side of the room, and so eight o’clock comes around and it’s like that really aggressive, just really, really … like a really aggressive sound, it’s like, “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!” over and over again, not saying it like that, it’s an alarm noise, but that’s what it sounds like to me, when it goes off, at first, because, and I think this is where I was starting to get started with all of this, that I need some sort of a medication, just a light dosage, where the alarm goes off, and it would only be one alarm, and I’d be like, “Good morning!” and I’d be up. Instead of what normally happens, which is: alarm goes off. I don’t hear anything. Nothing. I’m just sleeping away. Every once in a while I’ll be having a really good dream, like one of those really good morning dreams, and sometimes if the alarm is going off in the background, that alarm noise, it’ll sort of, you know, like I’ll hear it in the dream, but it won’t be hearing it from the awake world, it’ll be like I’m hearing it in the dream world. I think. That stuff happens on TV all the time. And five minutes goes by then my roommate starts banging on the walls, that guy never works at all, so I don’t know where he gets off, for serious, because it’s like, dude, why don’t you try and get up early in the morning? And then finally he keeps banging, and, like I’m still half asleep, sometimes I won’t even remember doing it, I’ll get out of bed and I’ll walk over to that other side of the room and I’ll take it off the charger and turn that alarm off and put the phone right next to me in bed. So then the next alarm goes off, “Wake u—“ I’m already turning it off. Back to sleep. And the snooze button. And then I wake up later than ever, and I’m running around, I know my boss is going to call me, and I’ll be like, “On my way boss!” but not even, because I don’t want to do that, he’ll know I’m still at home. No, better to just show up, try to act all out of breath, I’ll tell him, “Boss, the subway, it just stopped. You know how it is boss,” and the breathing in and out, really heavy, he’ll know that I ran right in, like right straight from the subway stop, as fast as I could. But if I could just have like one pill, up and at ‘em, and another one, just one to make me go to sleep at night, I swear, sometimes I try to go to bed early and I’m just like, I can’t do it, I feel like I just got home from work, and there’s no way, I can’t, I just … I can’t do it, I can’t just have like a whole day where it’s like, alarm, alarm, alarm, work, bed, alarm, like I need to, you know, I don’t know. I just got to like … I just got like go to a doctor, my roommate does that shit, he’s just like, “Uh … it hurts,” and I don’t even know how much longer he’s going be able to keep pulling this off. He never gets out of bed. Never has to. Just keeps knocking, banging, like turn your alarm off dude, not saying it out loud, but saying it with his banging. But every once in a while, if I’m like really asleep, like really, he’ll be like, “Dude! Shut the fuck off!” which doesn’t even make any sense. Like I get it, but it’s not right, right?

Robots are better than people

Robots are much better than people. Robots don’t get mad if you take that last slice of pie, even if they were saving it, even though they put it on a plate, wrapped the whole plate in plastic wrap, put it not in the fridge, but in the microwave, because they were going to eat it soon, and they wrote out a really long note, a note that said, “Please do not eat this slice of pie. I’m saving it. Also, don’t use the microwave. I’m just putting it in here because I didn’t want to leave it out and attract bugs. Please, please do not touch this pie. My mom drove all the way out to a pie shop at the end of Long Island to get it for me, it’s my favorite, and I’m really looking forward to eating it,” because robots don’t have feelings. You program them to do or say this or that, but if you change your mind later on, you just program them to do or say something else. Plus, when have you ever seen a robot write out a stupid long note like that? If a robot tried to grab a pen and paper, one, their giant metal hands would probably crush the pen, getting ink everywhere, and two, even if they somehow successfully calibrated the necessary pressure to effectively grip the pen without all of that exploding, there’s no way they’d then be able to apply that same gentle pressure from pen to paper without some sort of a ballpoint malfunction. Also, what kind of a robot doesn’t at least have some sort of a printer attachment installed, however rudimentary, like those little receipt printers at department stores? You’re telling me whoever designed a robot sophisticated enough to craft out a whole boring message about pie wouldn’t at least have thought to include one of those little printers? Unlikely. And besides, robots don’t even eat strawberry rhubarb pie. They don’t eat pie at all. Or anything. They just eat electricity, maybe some diesel and grease.

Robots are much better than other people. They don’t constantly come out of their bedrooms at two o’clock in the morning, “Yes, I can still hear the TV. Well lower it again. Look, I don’t care if the game play isn’t as immersive with the volume down that low, I have to get up for work in four hours, so for the last time, just lower the volume, go to sleep, Jesus,” over and over again, the same speech they gave at one o’clock in the morning, the same whiney complaint they’re going to come out and do at three o’clock in the morning. No, because robots don’t sleep at all. And they clean up for you instead of asking you to “clean up after yourself for a change!” They might have little vacuuming robots attached to their feet – no, instead of feet they’ll have vacuuming robots as their feet, those are their feet, so wherever they go they leave two trails of noticeably cleaner tracks behind them.

Robots are entirely preferable to all people, to all human beings. They’re never coming out of the house next door, knocking on your door, telling you, “Listen buddy, I don’t know how you keep getting into our encrypted Wi-Fi network, but you’ve got to stop stealing our Internet. Just pay for your own Internet. It’s like thirty bucks a month. Seriously, you’re mooching our Internet, you’re pirating gigs and gigs of media. You know I get calls sometimes from the cable company? They’re like, ‘stop illegally downloading all of these movies.’ I don’t know what to do. Just … you know, you’re smart enough to hack my router, why don’t you get a job doing computers? Come on man, just get out of the house once in a while. You look like shit. Seriously, no more Internet. I’ll call the cops,” every other week, they never call the cops, finally after months of toothless threats, banging on your door at eight in the morning, showing you a warrant, confiscating your computer, your hard drives. Robots don’t care. They’ve got built in Wi-Fi. Robots are like walking Internet hotspots. And what do they care about thirty dollars a month? Robots have no sense of money, of currency, of personal wealth. Robots love to share. Robots aren’t so judgmental.

Given the choice between robots and people, I’ll always choose robots. Robots are never like, “Come on, stop using my toothbrush! That’s great that you’re not grossed out by germs, and no, I don’t want to hear another speech about personal micro-biomes, just stop using my goddamn toothbrush!” Because, one, robots don’t have to brush their teeth, and two, if they did, they wouldn’t spend a hundred and forty dollars on a super fancy toothbrush and leave it out in the bathroom, all, look, enjoy the view, but never touch, and don’t even think about using it, because of course I’m going to use it, because, what are you crazy? And they won’t laugh at the personal micro-biome thing, because they’ll know that you’re going to want as many germs in your mouth as possible. If they had mouths. If they had teeth. But robots don’t have teeth. Just gears and circuits and microprocessors and motherboards.